A cellular phone may include an audio capture device, such as a microphone or speech synthesizer, and an audio encoder to generate audio packets (or frames). The phone may use communication protocol layers, such as radio link protocol (RLP), medium access control (MAC), and physical (PHY) layers. The phone may place audio packets in a RLP queue. A MAC layer module may generate MAC layer packets from contents of the RLP queue. The MAC layer packets may be converted to PHY layer packets for transmission across a communication channel to another communication device.